Paul A. Clayton (paaronclayton.delete@this.gmail.com) on May 6, 2013 9:00 pm wrote:
> With respect to Silvermont's microarchitecture, I am somewhat disappointed by the dropping of SMT. This
> decision probably makes sense for tablets, phones, and some embedded uses, but it might be less good for
> server workloads (though SMT is less useful in a narrow [and somewhat shallow] OoO microarchitecture).
> (Since, as far as I know, Intel's SMT implementation does not support software setting of thread priority,
> embedded uses that could have real-time software benefits from multithreading presumably cannot fully
> exploit such multithreading benefits.) I admit, I am irrationally fond of multithreading.

Everything below servers has more cores than work to keep them busy. The last thing you want is to have a critical path task slowed down 50% because the task scheduler decided to throw more work on that CPU.

Even in server land actual use of SMT is a niche market limited to certain databases and a few other tasks.

Anyone want to start a betting pool on when Intel dumps SMT for mainstream CPU's?
The upcoming Tock, or the one after that? I guess you could also drop SMT on a Tick update.